By Bernard Russell
Charges against Eder Herrera, who spent three months behind bars for stabbing to death his mother and brother, were dropped on Friday, after which prosecutors said that a former-Marine accused of killing four homeless men, would now be charged with the double murder.
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas announced the pending charges against Itzcoatl Ocampo in the October killings of Raquel Estrada and her son, Juan Herrera, in Yorba Linda. His arraignment on the new charges in expected to be held Monday.
City News Service reports Rackauckas as saying in a news conference, "We no longer have sufficient evidence to hold Mr. Herrera in custody. Since the filing of the charges against Herrera and Ocampo, there has been a significant amount of new evidence discovered in the case."
Herrera, 24, was released from jail Friday night, according to a Website posting of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Earlier this week, the Orange County Register had reported that similarities were found by detectives in the cases of the Yorba Linda deaths and the stabbings of four homeless men in December and January.
Authorities said on Thursday that there was enough evidence to link Ocampo- a high school friend of Eder Herrera- to the Yorba Linda killings.
The killings of Estrada and Juan Herrera happened in their Yorba Linda home, less than two miles from Ocampo's residence. Estrada's son Eder Herrera was arrested the day after the killings took place, while driving from a friend's home.
The DNA collected at Ocampo's home connected him to the Yorba Linda crime scene, Rackauckas said. "At this point we have not conclusively eliminated Mr. Herrera as a suspect in the case. We will continue to investigate the case," he said.
Ocampo has been charged with stabbing to death of four homeless men in a killing spree across the Orange County in the last two months. He has been charged on four counts of first-degree murder, as well as the special circumstances of multiple victims and murder by lying-in-wait.
The first victim was James Patrick McGillivray, 53- who was stabbed on December 20 near a shopping center in Placentia; after which Lloyd Middaugh, 42, was found on December 28 near a riverbed trail in Anaheim. On December 30, 57-year-old Paulus Smit was stabbed to death outside a Yorba Linda library; followed by John Berry, 64, who was stabbed to death on January, 13- the day Ocampo was arrested.
According to authorities, each of the four men was stabbed over 40 times with a weapon that's believed to be a 7-inch, fixed-blade, military-type knife. Prior to Ocampo's arrests, the police had fanned out across the Orange County, urging the homeless to be careful and to seek shelter indoors.
